Event Details

May 13, 2025

1:00 PM

This event is presented in collaboration with Instituto Cervantes Los Angeles.

Join Zoom Webinar

Passcode: 183417

Webinar ID: 936 4155 4219

Abstract

Cancer arises through the accumulation of somatic mutations over a person’s lifetime. While much attention has focused on protein-coding alterations, the majority of mutations occur in the noncoding genome, where their functional interpretation remains challenging because of their vast number, context dependence, and complex regulatory roles. Understanding the noncoding cancer genome requires high-resolution, scalable, and accessible analytical strategies. Recent advances in foundation models for genomics are transforming cancer research by enabling powerful new approaches to decode gene regulation directly from sequence and multiomic data. Here, we highlight illustrative examples of noncoding mutations in cancer, focusing on key regulatory elements and risk-associated variants whose mechanisms remain poorly understood. We discuss emerging methods to identify functional noncoding variants, predict their effects on gene expression, and uncover cancer-associated regulatory mutations. Finally, we outline a scientific program to deploy these technologies across diverse tumor types, with the goal of advancing biological discovery, precision oncology, and therapeutic innovation.

Host: Jose-Luis Ambite

Admin: Justina Gilleland

Speaker Bio

[1] Raul Rabadan is the Gerald and Janet Carrus Professor in the Departments of Systems Biology, Biomedical Informatics and Surgery at Columbia University. He is currently the director of the Program for Mathematical Genomics at Columbia University and previously the Director of the NCI Center for Topology of Cancer Evolution and Heterogeneity at Columbia University (2015-2021). From 2001 to 2003, Dr. Rabadan was a fellow at the Theoretical Physics Division at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2003 he joined the Physics Group of the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2005 Dr. Rabadan became a Martin A. and Helen Chooljian Member at The Simons Center for Systems Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has been named one of Popular Science's Brilliant 10 (2010), a Stewart Trust Fellow (2013), and he received the Harold and Golden Lamport Award at Columbia University (2014) and the Diz Pintado award (2018). Dr. Rabadan received the 2021 Outstanding Investigator Award by the National Cancer Institute. He was a member of the Cancer Convergence Team by Stand Up to Cancer. Dr. Rabadan’s current interest focuses on uncovering patterns of evolution in biological systems through the lens of genomics. His recent interests include the development of mathematical approaches to uncover the evolution of cancer and infectious diseases, including foundation models of regulation, topological data analysis and Random Matrix Theory, among many others. [2] https://www.rabadanlab.org/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%BAl_Rabad%C3%A1n [4] https://www.cnio.es/en/